Quick post tonight… following the big chunk of Brahms last night is a four disc set of Schumann’s piano music played by Wilhelm Kempff. Also in the stack was a disc of Sciarrino’s violin caprices and a disc of Allegri’s vocal music.

I have the op. 17 Fantasie on right now. It is a piece I just love, and don’t get to hear often enough. Kempff’s recording is quite good (though there is a recording with Richter that I like a little more). Whenever I hear it, it makes me want to be a better piano player. It is a piece I would really like to be able to play one day. And while I don’t think I’m too late, I do think that to play this piece (and really, most of the great literature) you need to be able to play it and sit with it for decades. And sooner or later, there just won’t be decades left for me to spend on these pieces. I haven’t been playing enough recently. I need to figure out a way to start making it part of a daily routine again.

The part of this piece that I think can make or break a performance is the last measures of the first movement, the silence between movements one and two, and the the first chords of the second. The relationships of dynamics, breath and tone seems to be so difficult to achieve in this piece… end the first movement too loudly, and you are stuck. The second movement needs to start brilliantly, but not bombastically, and if you end the first movement too loudly you would have to pound the keys for the second which would ruin those initial chords.  Come in too soon, and you are a runner not pacing themselves. How can you learn the exact touch, timing and feeling needed to do this in a week? Or a year? It needs time for you, as a player, to mess it up again and again so you can figure out how it needs to be done. And once you’ve found that it needs to set into your bones and age with you.